Hello list,
I am beginning work on converting a legacy db/app to rails. For now,
I am not having too much trouble with the dataside, but I am a bit
unsure of how to proceed on the view side. In particular, data entry
users currently sit in front of a terminal and use the keyboard as the
exclusive input device. Since the app has been around for quite some
time, they are fairly proficient with the keyboard. I’m not too sure
how to allow for efficient keyboard use in the browser. Tab ordering
doesn’t always seem . . . ordered (my version of firefox likes to jump
over select boxes). Also, there are serious data integrity issues with
the old db, so I would like to constrain user input for many fields via
select boxes. Yet, personally, I find using the keyboard alone for
select boxes a bit awkward. I could try an autocomplete text field and
validate the input, but that feels a bit weird.
In short, I want to reduce the amount of time users have to spend going
from keyboard to mouse to keyboard to mouse when entering data and I was
curious if anyone in the community had tackled this issue and/or has any
tips.
Thanks.
Brad